These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865-1930 (review)

Americans may have always worshipped bigness, but according to this American Studies analysis of the uses of size, they never did more than during the period between the Civil War and the Depression. This was a time when height was a particular marker of racial, gender and national superiority as well as a powerful indicator of progress. As English professor Michael Clarke notes, this was not simply or unambiguously a matter of equating "stature" with moral, intellectual, or evolutionary advance or superiority, but size portrayed in art especially was a powerful representation of position and progression (or degeneration).

This book is not a history of the American obsession with growth and size that coincides with new technology, organization, or wealth. There is discussion of the gigantic Ferris Wheel at the Chicago world's fair of 1893 and of the rise of the skyscraper in early 20th century New York but not the sublime of American bridges, dams, mammoth machines or circuses and other expressions of the spectacle of size. These Days of Large Things focuses on literary expressions of the obsession. Perhaps forty percent of the book deals with the theme of racial anthropology-beginning with interest in the pigmy as a sign of a racial throwback and of the inevitable degeneration and decline of these people as compared to the growing stature of whites. In the "advanced" west, not environment, class, or even medical misfortune explain the shortness of the Jew, the undersized truant, or the midget, but race and the atavistic survival of primitive racial features that often carried with them other "undesirable" behaviors. Advocates of the evolutionary doctrine of race of course used many measures to make claims of unchangeable physical difference, but height was surely an important one, a justification of discrimination.

But size also worked its way into understandings of social change. In his analysis of popular treatments of progressive-era industrial conflict (especially the giant trust vs "big" labor), Clarke finds the "little man" of the middle class caught between the rising classes of big business and big unions (and the middle class is often portrayed as confused and uncertain which way to turn). This was particularly evident in Ernest Poole's The Harbor (1915).

Size as expressed in the new skyscraper represented, however, more ambiguity. For Henry James, the tall building risked dwarfing the people below and to dehumanize those within. This form of modernism threatened James's genteel values and heritage. Yet, others, like the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, gloried in the new aestheticized image of the skyscraper, and by the 1920s new structures like the Woolworth's Building accommodated popular anxiety by progressively setting back the building in higher floors, making skyscrapers less imposing on the street and giving them a fairy tale castle aura. Size could both represent the advance of women and their threat to men (as in the appearance of the Gibson Girl). And, images of growing stature could serve as a challenge to biological and racial arguments as in Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), an autobiographical account of Jewish immigrants to America who "grew" in the process of liberation from the constraints of the Pale. At the same time, male anxiety about loss of economic power in the market and social authority in the family produced images of the shrinking man (as in Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle of 1906), and with this obsession the appeal of the physical culture of Charles Atlas.

In his fascinating Epilogue, Clarke reveals a revived obsession around size after 1945 around the car and details of the increasingly tall American. But he also recognizes the anxiety of the "little man" office worker and male fears of the powerful female "bombshell." This is all confirmed in a detailed and interesting analysis of the the motion pictures, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and the Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958). Again...